Televisions, phones, game stations, and computers have affected nearly every aspect of modern living. Functionality between such heterogenous devices is merging. For example, computers can be used for voice communications and phones can be used to run applications or play games. With increased functionality comes increased need for management and control. For example, parents want the ability to control which content is viewable by children, how many text messages can be sent, an amount of time consumed in an entertainment activity regardless of the device, hosting in the cloud, etc. Currently, policy settings must be set for each device individually, making it logistically difficult to modify settings dynamically. Even further, policy can be set for each application on a device individually, so that policy adjustments must be made to possibly hundreds of different policy settings if changes are desired. Multiply this with the number of device types used to access common services which include smartphones, television, PC, game consoles, as well as hosted services, one can see it rapidly becomes a complex problem.
Group policy has existed across homogeneous devices (e.g., a group of computers all running the same operating system) and is currently used for Microsoft® Office® 2010. For example, group policy is an infrastructure that is used to deliver and apply one or more desired configurations or policy settings to a set of targeted users and computers. The Group Policy infrastructure consists of a Group Policy engine and several individual extensions. These extensions are used to configure Group Policy settings, either by modifying a registry or setting Group Policy settings for security settings, software installation, folder redirection, browser maintenance, wireless network settings, and other areas. Each installation of group policy consists of two extensions: A server-side extension used to define and set the policy settings applied to client computers and a client-side extension that a Group Policy engine calls to apply policy settings.
Although policy settings are well established across homogeneous devices in a business environment, there still is a need for increased policy settings flexibility across different device types having different underlying platforms made up of unique combinations of hardware, operating systems and unique applications performing disparate or similar functions.
It is desirable, therefore, to increase flexibility of policy settings across device types, platforms, users and/or applications.